Carl Stone brings his laptop from Tokyo for a performance at JACCC

TOKYO — The Suidōbashi metro station was packed with Tokyo rockers on the last Saturday in October for an Oasis reunion concert at the Tokyo Dome, a landmark baseball stadium across the street. I, however, wandered around the block onto a nondescript residential street seeking out a building with a secreted Ftarri sign. That is a cramped basement performance space with room for 20 folding chairs and a small stage on which there were two tables set up for electronics.

Shelves along the walls were filled with hundreds of obscure CDs and DVDs for sale featuring improvisors and avant-gardists. This sold-out event featured young sound artist Elico Suzuki, who goes by suzueri. She had that morning made little transparent plastic cubes with electronic circuitry inside. When she pushed them around her table, they emitted whistles and wails, which a giggly suzueri accompanied by singing into a microphone, adding her own charmingly oddball whistles and wails.

Next to her was a 72-year-old cult-legend laptop composer dressed in black and wearing his trademark fedora, conveying ageless cool. There was no way to figure out what Carl Stone was up to. He sat and stared at his screen, positioned away from the audience, as inscrutable as someone at a cafe working on a laptop.

There were no wheres or whys to what came out of his iPad. Stone transforms and distorts sounds he records of our sonic environment as radically and as astonishingly as a sculptor does with stone.

In their hourlong improvisation, the laptop-ist appeared to avuncularly guide the giddy cube-ist, while also indulging her excited climactic outbursts. The improvisation petered out after more than an hour with no sense of arrival, just an agreeable sensation of being OK in wherever ambient world you had just landed.

Stone, who will present a new work at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo on Thursday night, doesn’t fit into ambient music (he’s far too resourceful for that) or any genre. He regularly tours the world, and he frequently performs with a wide range of instrumentalists and singers worlds apart. A week later, I heard Stone in another improvisational evening at a somewhat larger and more established experimental Tokyo theater where he grounded a bizarrely incongruous trio that included a veteran Japanese smooth-jazz, ambient-friendly saxophonist and a young, radical, frighteningly intense butoh dancer.

Despite all this — or because of it — Stone happens to be a quintessential Los Angeles composer. He’s from the San Fernando Valley, where he grew up with an enthusiasm for classical music and opera, along with yearning for urbanity. That led to toying around with progressive 1960s pop music and then attending CalArts, where he studied with pioneering electronic music composers.

But Stone — chatting over a beer and snacks in an out-of-the-way Tokyo alley after we had attended the refreshingly modernist Dairakudakan butoh company’s version of “Rite of Spring” — says he found revelation as much from a student job in the CalArts library as at the synthesizer.

His library task was to dub every LP in the collection onto cassettes. This included rare discs of world music, arcane complete series of early classical music, Ravi Shankar playing Indian ragas, Led Zeppelin and everything in between.

“I heard all this incredible music,” Stone explains. “I loved it and still do. But what really changed my life was that this was a Sisyphean task I could never finish because there was new stuff coming faster than I could copy it.

“So I proposed that they set up multiple turntables and multiple tape recorders, which I could use in parallel. I would then listen to three different albums at the same time, and I began to notice all kinds of insane collisions when you would happen to have some African music on the front table, something entirely different begin to play on turntable 2 and then Berg or Stockhausen on turntable 3. And that has remained the path I’m on to this day.”

That path led to him founding with other CalArts grads the Independent Composers Assn., which put on concerts in art galleries and elsewhere around L.A. in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Stone also became a familiar figure as music director of the Pacifica FM station KPFK. He served a new music organizer and entrepreneur, which included running L.A.‘s New Music America festival in 1984.

All the while, Stone created L.A. soundscapes that he named after his favorite Asian restaurants. His restlessness, be it musical, culinary or otherwise cultural, took him to San Francisco and New York. In 1984, Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi commissioned a piano piece, and he made his first trip to Japan, instantly falling in love with the country. After spending more and more time in Japan, he moved to Tokyo in 2001 when invited to teach electronic music at a university near Nagoya.

All along, Stone had been transforming urban environments in his electronics, always adapting to the latest technology. In Japan, the sound environment is about as rich, particularly in urban landscapes, as can be imagined. Stone wandered around, with a recorder hidden in his fedora, documenting and then disassembling all that, as well as what he recorded in his travels. He has also kept an apartment in L.A., where he regularly returns and performs in new music venues like Arts + Archives downtown.

With his new hourlong solo piece for JACCC, however, Stone has an opportunity to put both worlds together. The inspiration for “Daimatsu” is the Goma Fire Ceremony, which is performed at the Koyasan Temple around the corner from JACCC the last Sunday of every month and, in a long-standing Little Tokyo tradition, on New Year’s Day.

Daimatsu means pine tree, with all the implications a pine can have aesthetically, culturally and spiritually in Japanese culture. Stone says he’s taken as his raw material not only sounds from the Koyasan Temple but also such sounds of Japan as the boiling water of a tea ceremony. The way he then works, usually late at night in his small Tokyo apartment, is to strive for ma, the space between sounds and what Stone describes as “the intangible area between the unrecognizable and the unfathomable.”

Stone also says that the more ma penetrates his work, the less busy it becomes. That was apparent in how he saved what could easily have become a minor disaster at Za Koenji, the venue where he was joined by saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu and butoh dancer Taketeru Kudo for “Origin Theory.”

Taketeru applied his arresting physicality to 70 exhausting minutes portraying what appeared to be a violent transitioning from one existence to another. Not inaccurately did he describe this as “a regeneration through palpitations and blood circulation.” Shimizu is an exploratory jazz musician who has of late gained popularity for his television scores and inoffensively ambient music that employs soporific electronics. They’re an odd, incompatible couple.

For Taketeru, sound existed as bodily stimulus. Shimizu responded by impressively channeling his earlier, more progressive style. At the same time, the saxophonist had brought his own laptop that produced anodyne drones that intruded on Stone. It took a Stone throw to find the ma.

Stone’s iPad, with its open sonic complexity, created a sense of space, a roomy aural soundscape in which jazz and butoh became elements not egos, not larger than life, just more life, the merrier. Thanks to Stone, three human turntables spinning at once went from competitively filling space to, in the spirit of ma, making space.